Caleb Jenkins presented nHibernate/ORM at TulsaDNUG

Published 26 September 05 10:54 PM | dwalker 

Caleb Jenkins gave a very good presentation on nHibernate/ORM for the Tulsa .NET Users Group tonight.

It was enough to give me the opinion that todays ORM isn't of much value to me. Considering that we currently use CodeSmith to generate our Stored Procedures and Data Objects.

ORM seems to really only be useful as a short cut from creating the Stored Procedures.

Since, it doesn't save any steps when having to go back and add a new column to a table:

1. Add Column to table, 2. Add Column to ORM Mapping XML, 3. Add Property to Data Layer, 4. Add Property to UI

versus:

1. Add Column to table, 2. Add Column to Stored Procedures, 3. Add Property to Data Layer, 4. Add Property to UI

Does any one else have a better opinion?

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# Paul Wilson said on September 30, 2005 2:32 AM:
If you are under the impression that O/RM is supposed to simply make adding a field easier and nothing else, then you are correct that it doesn't do much for you. But that isn't what O/RM is about at all.

Instead O/RMs are about flexibility and maintainability. They give you the ability to filter and sort (and page if the mapper's good) on any criteria -- far simpler than stored procs or your own hard-coded dynamic sql. They also let you skip writing (or generating) stored procs with all the boring CRUD entirely -- not a big deal if you generate them, but typically far easier in the long run when you have to worry about re-generation or maintenance. Of course you also get the ability to target multiple databases, which isn't a big deal for many, but for those that sell their products this can be huge. There are other reasons that one can give for O/RM also, but they tend to be less significant and harder to explain, but flexibility and maintainability are huge. I personally came from the traditional MS stored proc with DAL camp, and the time I've saved with O/RMs, both in the short term and long term, has been tremendous.

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About dwalker

David Walker has over 15 years experience in application development with over 50% of that employed as a consultant with companies such as: Texaco, Bank of Oklahoma, Winner Communications (ESPN.com) and IBM Global Services. At the age of 14, he began his application development ambitions with a Commodore 64, BASIC, and a 300 baud modem. Even at that early age, he primarily focused on two specific application types: multi-user communities and database applications.

His hunger to learn as much as possible about development lead him through courses such as DBase III, DBase IV, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and several in UNIX. He started his development career first doing heavy processing with Access and VBA, then moved on to VB 3, Oracle, and Delphi. Visual Basic was one environment that remained constant for many years, including his very first .NET projects performed in Visual Basic.NET.

After working several years on very high end internal Corporate applications, the consultant company he was working for, sought out his ideas for actual software products that could be packaged and sold. He had already developed several prototypes of a dynamic portal application, before portals even became popular, so this became the logic decision and he became the Director of Product Development. Under his direction, a team of developers and graphic artists, took a skinning approach before that become popular, and completed the core portal application, and continued on to developer 15+ add-on modules, including things such as: Help Desk Ticket Systems, Change Control, Records Management, Human Resources, and many more applications. Eventually, it spun off into it's own separate company as KnowledgeGEAR, a complete intranet in the box solution.

Having worked as a consultant, he has had a experience with a very wide range of applications and architectures, at one time, even converting several Fox Pro and GW-Basic applications to VB 6 and ASP. His early training of Unix and the C language and years of experience with JavaScript, lead him very quickly to C#, where he has remained focused ever since.

He is the current President of the Tulsa Developers .NET user group.. He has been an MCP since 2003 and MCAD and MCSD since 2005. He is currently pursuing his MCDBA and then on to MCSE.

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